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The SANS Institute recently released its 2025 Threat Hunting Survey, highlighting critical trends and challenges in cybersecurity threat detection and response. Below are the key findings:
- Decline in Outsourcing: Organizations are increasingly building internal threat-hunting capabilities instead of relying on third-party services.
- Cloud Visibility Issues: Many teams struggle with visibility across cloud environments and hunting across diverse log sources.
- Data Normalization Challenges: Security teams face difficulties in normalizing data from disparate security tools.
- Automation & AI Focus: There is a growing emphasis on AI-driven threat hunting and improving automation.
- Business Email Compromise (BEC): BEC remains the most discovered threat during threat-hunting exercises.
- Living Off the Land (LOTL): Attackers continue to heavily rely on LOTL techniques, leveraging legitimate system tools for malicious activities.
You Should Know: Threat Hunting Commands & Techniques
To enhance your threat-hunting capabilities, here are essential commands, tools, and techniques to detect malicious activities:
1. Detecting Living Off the Land (LOTL) Attacks
Attackers abuse legitimate system tools like PowerShell, WMI, and PsExec. Detect suspicious usage with:
Windows (PowerShell & Event Logs)
Check for unusual PowerShell execution
Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{
LogName='Microsoft-Windows-PowerShell/Operational';
ID=4104; Script block logging
} | Where-Object { $_.Message -match "malicious_pattern" }
Detect WMI abuse
Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{
LogName='Microsoft-Windows-WMI-Activity/Operational';
ID=5861; Suspicious WMI persistence
}
Linux (Bash History & Process Monitoring)
Check for unusual commands in bash history cat ~/.bash_history | grep -E "(curl.-o|wget.--no-check|chmod.777)" Monitor for suspicious child processes ps aux --forest | grep -i -E "(sh -c|python -c|perl -e)"
2. Hunting for BEC (Business Email Compromise)
- Office 365 Audit Logs:
Search for suspicious email forwarding rules Get-Mailbox | Get-InboxRule | Where { $<em>.ForwardTo -or $</em>.RedirectTo } -
Detecting Anomalous Logins:
Check Azure AD sign-ins (requires Azure CLI) az monitor activity-log list --query "[?operationName.value=='Sign-in activity']"
- Automating Threat Hunting with AI & SIEM
- Elasticsearch + Sigma Rules:
Use Sigma to detect suspicious processes sigma convert -t elastalert -s ./rules/process_creation_suspicious.yml
-
YARA for Malware Hunting:
Scan memory for malicious patterns yara -r /path/to/malware_rules.yar /proc/[0-9]/exe
What Undercode Say
The 2025 Threat Hunting Survey confirms that adversaries are evolving, forcing defenders to improve automation, AI-driven detection, and log normalization. Key takeaways:
- Internal threat-hunting teams are becoming the norm.
- Cloud and hybrid environments remain challenging to monitor.
- LOTL and BEC are still dominant attack vectors.
To stay ahead, security teams must:
✅ Leverage AI-driven analytics for anomaly detection.
✅ Normalize logs across SIEM and EDR solutions.
✅ Monitor PowerShell, WMI, and Linux process trees for LOTL attacks.
✅ Automate threat-hunting workflows with Sigma, YARA, and Elasticsearch.
Expected Output:
A structured threat-hunting framework combining SIEM alerts, endpoint logs, and AI-driven analysis will be crucial in 2025. Organizations must invest in internal expertise, automation, and cloud visibility to combat evolving threats.
Relevant URLs:
References:
Reported By: Mthomasson Sans – Hackers Feeds
Extra Hub: Undercode MoN
Basic Verification: Pass ✅
